Question

I’m including a local class that requests a file from a remote server. This process is rather unreliable — because the remote server is often overloaded — and I sometimes have to wait 20 or so seconds before the include gives up and continues.

I would like to have a limit on the execution time of the included script; say, five seconds.

Current code:

include('siteclass.class.php');

Update:

My code inside the class:

$movie = str_replace(" ","+",$movie);
$string = join('',file($siteurl.$l.'/moviename-'.$movie));

if(!$i) { static $i = 1;}
if($file_array = $string)
{
    $result = Return_Substrings($file_array, '<item>', '</item>');

    foreach($result as $res) {

That’s basically it, as far as the loading goes. The internal processing takes about 0.1 s. I guess that’s pretty doable.

Answer 1

Note that I didn’t test this code, take this like a proposition :

$fp = fopen('siteclass.class.php', 'r');

stream_set_timeout($fp, 2);
stream_set_timeout($fp,$timeout);
$info = stream_get_meta_data($fp);

if ($info['timed_out']) {
  echo "Connection Timed Out!";
} else {
  $file = '';
  while (!feof($fp)) {
    $file .= fgets($fp);
  }
  eval($file);
}

The timeout is set in seconds, so the example set it to two seconds.